Weatherspoon: Bespoke Online Assessment

Background

J D Wetherspoon is one of the UK’s leading pub chains and each year they are faced with sifting over 300,000 applicants to pub staff vacancies across the country.

Our previous experience of providing high volume, online assessment services for other large clients within retail and hospitality, meant we were in an ideal position to provide a bespoke psychometrics solution that was both cost effective and efficient.

Wetherspoon believe that an integral part of a successful assessment system is ensuring individuals have the right values, attitude and motivations for the role. They required a time and cost effective tool that would sift applicants, raise the calibre of candidates invited to interviews, attract the best candidates to the job, and predict effective performance.

Significantly reduce time and workload associated with sifting of applicants

Be cost effective

Our Approach

To do this Criterion Partnership sought to thoroughly understand the pub chain as well as the individual roles. This was done through conducting a number of staff focus groups and interviews, and by observing staff at work in a cross section of pubs across the country.

We fed back our findings and used this knowledge to create a bespoke personality profiling assessment for each role, as well as numerical, verbal and situational judgement tests all specific to a job with Wetherspoon.

The assessments were developed to utilise Criterion’s online testing platform Coast with a bespoke system ‘skin’ to be used for the online assessments. This was developed to keep the Wetherspoon branding and identity consistent with pre-existing aspects of the application process. The Coast system fully integrated with the Wetherspoon online application form and Applicant Tracking System to provide a seamless candidate experience.

The Results

The assessments were trialled internally by current Wetherspoon employees to validate the tests and provide valuable data for comparing applicants. The assessments and tests received extremely positive feedback from Wetherspoon employees, praising the assessments as engaging and realistic.

With the assessments finalised, Criterion provided easy to understand system instructions for managers to be able use the assessments and the system-generated candidate reports to guide their interviews and their hiring decisions. The assessments went live for applicants in May 2012, with further validation assessments to follow at the start of 2013 to ensure the assessments are maintaining a high standard.